Revisionary Narratives

Book excerpt: Revisionary Narratives examines the historical and formal evolutions of Moroccan women's auto/biography in the last four decades, particularly its conflation with testimony and its expansion beyond literary texts. It analyzes auto/biographical and testimonial acts in Arabic, colloquial Moroccan Darija, French, and English in the fields of prison narratives, visual arts, theater performance, and digital media, situating them within specific sociopolitical and cultural contexts of production and consumption. Part One begins by tracing the rise of a feminist consciousness in prison narratives produced and/or published in the late 1970s through the 2000s. Part Two moves to analyzing the ubiquity of auto/biography and testimony in the arts as well as contemporary sociopolitical activism. The focus throughout the various case studies is women's engagement with patriarchal and (neo)imperial norms and practices as they relate to their experiences of political violence, activism, migration, and displacement. To understand why and how women collapse the boundaries between autobiography, biography, testimony, and sociopolitical commentary, the book employs a broad, transdisciplinary, montage approach that combines theories on gender and autobiography and takes into account postcolonial, postmodern, transnational, transglobal and translocal perspectives. Doing so, the book marks auto/biography and testimony as a specific field of inquiry within the study of women's postcolonial cultural productions in the Moroccan and, more broadly, the Maghrebi and the Middle-Eastern contexts.